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Nice, Kirk Peperdine seems like a very nice guy. Although we’re only like 4 hours underway I think this will be an interesting course. Also Kirk is doing the entire course. I had my doubts if he would.

More on the contents and my views on the course later. Right now it’s almost time for lunch. And Kirk is paging his slides quite fast.

Next week I am attending a course offered by Xebia through the NL-JUG. It’s about Java Performance tuning.

They are claiming Kirk Pepperdine from Java Performance tuning will be there as well. I am curious how much face time we will actually have with Kirk. I won’t be surprised if he pops his nose through the door for a bit and is off again. But on the other hand, he could be doing the whole course just as well. But my guess is he’ll be there for the full four days. Here’s the course description.

An interesting observation I’ve done is that the Xebia course description seems to match up perfectly with this page on the Java Performance tuning site. That would seem to suggest that someone from Java Performance tuning is attending and he’s bringing along all the instruction material as well.

I guess that’s one way to offer a course. A simple matter of reselling.

One last point. The confirmation said that the attendee should bring their own laptop with Java 5.0 SDK installed and wireless network support. That includes my Apple PB too I guess.

Last week I installed Scheme on my system. The distribution I chose was Chicken. I’ve wanted to do some stuff with a LISP based language for a while now. Just to see if I can get my head around it.

And while I was at it, I installed Haskell as well. And let me tell you, functional programming, it’s been a while.

Last Wednesday I attended the J-Fall conference by the NL-Jug. Driving home I was already thinking about doing this blog post. But as you can see, it’s two days later now. When I got home after the J-Fall I immediately took a shower en jumped into my bed. I felt exhausted. Yesterday morning I felt really sick and today it is getting a bit better. Things like dizziness, head ache, belly ache and nausea. Fortunately I am not feeling feverish. Right now I actually feel good enough to get hit by some boredom as well. But reading up a book or just stretching my brain a bit just hurts like hell and makes me feel sicker. So this blog posting won’t involve the most enlightening opinions I guess.

Anyway, about the goodies at the J-Fall. I actually scored two very nice books. There was a company standing next to Sun’s booth and they provided these little scratch cards with which you could “win” a book. I actually was lucky enough to win a book. So I immediately dragged one of the stand workers from my companies booth to have a go at it as well. He scored as well. Unfortunately for him there were no books on display that he liked so he asked which book a would like and he got it for me. Also because I was a speaker at the J-Fall I was presented with a speaker present at the end of the conference. I didn’t really count in that to happen. So after attending numerous conferences I finally was able to score some real conference goodies beyond mugs, mouse pads and t-shirts.

Now I’m back to bed again. I think I over estimated how fit I was when I started writing this.

On October 11th I gave a presentation at the Dutch NL-Jug’s J-Fall conference. As this post was prepared before-hand and posted automatically during my presentation, I will put up another blog post reflecting on my performance during and reflection on the reception of my presentation.

First of, here are the book recommendations I made during the presentation:

Now concerning the presentation itself: It is in Quicktime format posted here (2.3 mb).

Enjoy!

I’m still looking for a nice AJAX screen-shot for my presentation at J-FALL next Wednesday. I do have some candidates, but none are that impressive yet. AJAX is one of those technologies that you really have to see in action to appreciate. Anyway, if you know or have an impressive AJAX example and can provide me with a nice screen-shot, drop me a comment. I’ll be sure to insert proper credit.

A colleague asked me which tech books I have. And yes, I actually read all of these books front to back… How sick is that.

Yeah, I know I’m not the only one with things to do. But man is this week packed or what?

• Monday night a friend stopped by who I am helping out with keeping a (sweet) secret
• Do some Salsa dancing on tuesday night (ok this is sort of relaxing)
• Busy preparing a conference presentation which is next week, about Java user interfaces
• Preparing a meet-up for my Master of Science, something with business rules and formal markdown
• Not to mention the dentist, I hate that guy
• Running two contracts simultaneously
  • Also this week marks the last week in the shorter one of the two. So deliveries to deliver
• And I get the feeling I am forgetting something. My schedule doesn’t mention anything… oh dear… what is it.

What it comes down to is this… I barely have time to sleep and today I already am having a hard time not taking an aspirin. So today I made it, I’ll go crash early tonight. A simple situation, I could keep on working or I can max out my time in bed tonight. Knowing myself I’d better get to sleep soon, else I’ll regret it tomorrow.

Fortunately next week I’m back on one contract again, the presentation has been given, no dentist and by then I’ll have remembered what I am forgetting right now. Anyway, for those of you who haven’t heard from me in a while… Now you know why.

Edit (5th october, 9:16 in the morning): I remember now. I promised a week ago I would have a review done last monday. Oops… next time I’ll mark it down in my calendar.